“The secret of the world”

“The secret of the world” is a phrase attached to the murders of women in Santa Teresa and its surroundings, where repeated violence, uncertain identification, and official evasions turn individual deaths into evidence of a wider social reality. The novel locates this secret not in a solved mystery but in the accumulating record of victims whose stories remain incomplete.

The phrase and the novel’s center

In a reflection on the design of 2666, the novel’s physical center is identified with Santa Teresa, a city described as a reflection of Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican-U.S. border. The five parts of the novel converge there, where the crimes form the dramatic backdrop. One character’s claim that they contain “the secret of the world” gives the murders a significance beyond the investigation of any single case.

The phrase is set beside the idea of a “hidden center” concealed beneath the novel’s physical one. The hidden center may be 2666 itself, the date around which the whole work is understood to take shape. The novel thus makes its central crimes both a location and a problem of interpretation: Santa Teresa gathers the narrative’s strands, while the murders suggest an underlying truth that remains obscured rather than explained.

A record that begins with uncertainty

The first woman placed on the 1993 list is Esperanza Gomez Saldana, a thirteen-year-old found in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores. Children playing there alerted adults, and two women were praying near her body when police arrived. The women said they did not know her and that she was not from the neighborhood. Her name and age were eventually established, but the circumstances of the discovery already place her between public notice and social estrangement: she is found, yet initially belongs nowhere in the account of those present.

The narrative says the killings began to be counted from January 1993, but immediately questions whether that date marks their true beginning. Other girls and women may have died in 1992; some were never found, while others may have been buried anonymously in the desert or disposed of without a known location. The list therefore offers not a complete history but a point from which counting becomes possible. Its first entry is also a reminder of the people missing from it.

Identification, evidence, and institutional limits

Esperanza’s body passed through a police station, where a judge and police officers examined and photographed it, and then to the city hospital morgue. The medical examiner determined that she had been strangled. The inquiry could establish a cause of death, but the police chief and officers did not know her identity when they discussed the case. The distinction between documenting a death and explaining it recurs throughout the novel’s crime accounts.

In another 1993 case, an unnamed woman was found in a school field. The medical examiner estimated that she was between twenty-three and twenty-five and gave her probable cause of death, but her name was never learned. In January 1995, workers who uncovered a woman’s skeleton at a farming cooperative initially thought it belonged to a small man. The examiner could determine that the remains were female and that murder was likely, but could not establish how she died or confidently date the death. A precise date would have required sending the bones to an institute in Hermosillo or to Mexico City.

These cases make the limits of forensic and police knowledge part of the phrase’s force. Bodies and remains can yield facts, but those facts do not automatically restore a person’s identity or produce an account of what happened. In the skeleton case, the police publicly floated the possibility that the dead woman had been a hitchhiker killed elsewhere and randomly buried near Santa Teresa, a statement that evaded responsibility rather than resolving uncertainty.

The secret as social pattern

Other details connect the killings to the conditions surrounding women’s everyday lives. Margarita Lopez Santos, whose body was found in June 1993, worked a night shift at a maquiladora in the El Progreso industrial park. She left work before dawn. The surrounding roads and nearby homes lacked adequate lighting, and much of Colonia Guadalupe Victoria had no electricity. The narrative can establish her shift and departure, but not what happened after she began walking home. The gap between a known routine and an unknown fate becomes one of the crimes’ recurring structures.

An October 1995 discovery brings the pattern into another scene of uncertain identification. A girl found near railroad tracks had no identification, and none of the women reported missing in Santa Teresa matched the medical examiner’s description. Epifanio and Lalo Cura visited the scene; when asked what he thought of it, Lalo answered that there was no crime scene because it had been wiped clean. The exchange shifts attention from the body alone to the conditions under which evidence can be gathered—or has ceased to be available.

Taken together, these accounts give “the secret of the world” its unsettling, unresolved meaning. The murders do not yield one explanation that makes the victims’ deaths legible. Instead, the novel repeatedly shows people counted without being fully known, evidence recorded without a complete account, and public explanations that leave responsibility at a distance. The secret is inseparable from that persistence of violence and from the failures of recognition that allow the dead to remain, in different ways, unidentified.